The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon

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Frantz Fanon was born in Martinique, a French colony, in 1925. As a young man, he volunteered to fight in De Gualles army for the liberation of France, and trained to become a doctor and psychiatrist. His experiences as a black man under French colonial rule had a profound effect on him. In 1952, he wrote Black Skin, White Masks, a powerful analysis of the effects of racism on the human psyche. He was later reassigned to a hospital in French Algeria. It was here that he became involved in the rebellion of the National Liberation Front (FLN), who fought to break free from colonial power, and the draconian response of the French authorities, which included widespread mass killings and the systematic use of torture. Fanons work for the FLN as a propagandist and psychiatrist became highly contentious. His final work, The Wretched of the Earth, was published in 1961 just before Fanon died at the age of 36. It has proved to be one of the most controversial and influential books of its time. The Rebels Clinic is a searing biography of the short and harrowing life of Frantz Fanon, a man whose legacy is nuanced, disputed, powerful, and in a time where the topics of empire and race have become increasingly pressing, still very much felt today.

Author Bio

Adam Shatz is the US Editor of the London Review of Books, and has written for the New York Times Magazine, the New York Review of Books and the New Yorker. He also hosts the podcast Myself with Others, which explores the life of ideas and features guests within the arts, culture and literature. Shatz studied history at Columbia University, and has been a visiting professor at Bard College and New York University and a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars.